Telecommunications is becoming increasingly important in today's society. Telecommunications systems allow persons located at great distances to communicate with one another. Telephone calls require a connection between the telephones used by the persons involved in the call. Such connections were traditionally formed by creating a physical connection by physically closing a plurality of switches to complete a circuit between the two telephones. More recently, physical switches have been replaced with computer software referred to as a “softswitch.” Softswitches perform necessary switching of telephone calls through software, thereby creating the required circuit.
One problem affecting softswitches is a potential for memory overload. Memory overload refers to the consumption of too much of a computer system's memory capacity. If too much memory is utilized, memory corruption may occur, resulting in a core dump. Another potential problem with softswitches is the potential for central processing unit overload. This may occur when too much of the processing capability of the associated processor is utilized. Symptoms of such a problem include irregular “timeout” situations. In such a “timeout,” the processor is unable to execute instructions or process calls.